Macintosh Powerbook G3 booting problem?

I turn on my couzins Macintosh Powerbook G3 laptop and when the grey backround appears there is a picture of a disk with a question mark in the middle of the disk and the question mark blinks inside the disk. I myself think the OS is messed up and this would be my first mac i have ever messed with thats why i am posting this to see if anyone has accured this problem.

it means no OS found, if it was working before then a reinstall should fix it, if you have important data on it then DiskWarrior should have no problem fixing it and retrieving your data

if it happens again it could be a sign of a failing hard drive, and the hard drive may need to be replaced, if this is the case then getting the computer cold may temporally fix it, at least enough to get your important data off the drive

I wouldn't suggest getting the whole computer cold - as that may lead you to put it in the freezer or something and condensation could kill it.

Take the hard drive out if you want to try the "cold" thing, but I've never actually heard of that working.

edman is right about your hard drive though, it could be fried. I would try resetting the PRAM (google search it) first. Put in the OS X install disk and see if the drive shows up, and see if you can navigate onto it.

You can also boot into target disk mode (google search it) and hook it up to another computer with a firewire port to see if the disk shows up and if you can navigate it.

If you can't get the disk to show up with any of these things, the HD is fried and you've got nothing to lose by sticking it in the freezer (put it in a ziploc first, though)

thank you for the information guys im going to dl diskwarrior right now and see what i can do with it like i said thank you for the information you are a big help